https://crimethinc.com/podcasts/the-ex-worker/episodes/73
In October 2019, an uprising exploded throughout Chile. For a while, the police and armed forces lost control. Seeking to placate the rebels, the government announced a plebiscite about whether to replace the constitution, a relic of the far-right dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A majority of the parties in congress drew up a roadmap for this process, calling it the “Agreement for Social Peace.” In May 2021, elections to determine who would participate in the constitutional process were hailed as a victory for “independent” politics—though we expressed concern that this process would chiefly serve to pacify social movements, pointing out that today, it is much easier to rally opposition to a government than it is to make change via state institutions. As it turned out, in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, a majority of Chileans voted to reject the proposed constitution—shocking many Chilean leftists, who had not expected such a resounding defeat.
Looking on from a distance, the events in Chile strike us as part of a familiar pattern. The institutions of capitalism and the state impoverish and oppress people, precipitating revolt; the defenders of those institutions scramble to channel anger and desire for change back into reforming the prevailing institutions; as they shift their attention to reform and electoral politics, the rebels lose leverage on those who hold power, and the cycle repeats itself.
In fact, electoral politics has served to subdue revolutionary movements since the emergence of modern democracy. In France, immediately after the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, elections served to return reactionaries to power; at the apex of the May 1968 uprising, president Charles de Gaulle regained control by calling a new election for June 23. Transformative social change takes place at a different pace than the establishment of majorities. Seeking to legitimize proposals by majority vote—rather than opening up space for experimentation by decentralizing the processes that distribute agency and legitimacy—will always reduce political possibility to the lowest common denominator.
The same repressive process can play out even via direct democracy, especially when it becomes separated from the force of revolt that offered it leverage in the first place. Movements that wait to reach consensus before taking action tie their hands from the start, as we can see by comparing different encampments during the Occupy movement. In Bosnia in 2014, an uprising that began with the burning of government buildings ended with a whimper when the plenums that had crafted a proposal for social change discovered that the reconstituted government no longer had any need for reform once the threat from the streets had abated. It seems to us that the transformative process of revolt itself is the important thing to self-organize, not formal processes to achieve social change through the institutions of the state. Anything that distracts us from this priority can only weaken our movements.
We still remember how, at the high point of the 2019 revolt, for about a month, Santiago and many other parts of Chile were self-organized via a decentralized network of neighborhood assemblies employing a wide array of decision-making structures. Each one was shaped by the participants, focusing on the matters that concerned them and discussing what could be done immediately with the resources at their disposal. This remains the high-water mark of popular power in Chile.
After the constitution was approved, the cabildos (town hall meetings) began in many of the same spaces. They appeared to mimic the neighborhood assembly format, but focused on discussing the constitutional process. The immediate power that people had experienced in their neighborhood assemblies gave way to a sense that power came from the state—or at least through the state—and that their desires would eventually be fulfilled at the end of a long, orderly, democratic process. (“And you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”)
Comparing the events in Chile with the grim end results of other left electoral victories in Brazil, Greece, and Spain—which admittedly did not go so far as to propose to establish a new constitutional basis for government—it seems to us that anything that draws us back into trying to reform the institutions of power can only sidetrack us and obscure our real proposals by associating them with the inevitable failures of the state. From our perspective, the failure of the constitutional process in Chile is a cautionary tale. At the same time, if we want to foster movements that can reject such compromises and continue building strength through changing circumstances, we will have to innovate ways to make them sustainable.
